Robert Redford wears a Seiko Sports 100

In 1969, two student hackers and long-time friends, Martin Brice and Cosmo, use their skills to shift money away from causes they consider evil and toward underfunded ones they believe do good. More than two decades later, Brice has become Martin Bishop, played by Robert Redford, running a team of security specialists in Phil Alden Robinson's 1992 caper: Sidney Poitier as a former CIA operative, Dan Aykroyd as a paranoid technician, David Strathairn as a blind phone phreak, River Phoenix as a young hacking prodigy. Then NSA agents surface holding the identity Bishop abandoned, and the price of their silence is recovering a device code-named Setec Astronomy, an anagram of 'too many secrets'. Ben Kingsley plays Cosmo, the partner from 1969.

On Bishop's wrist through the film's casual scenes is a stainless steel Seiko 7A28-7049 from the Sports 100 line: a quartz chronograph introduced in 1983, with a black rotating bezel around a matte black dial, an outer tachymeter, three sub-registers at the 3, 6, and 9 o'clock positions, and a 38.5mm case on a tapered bar-link bracelet. You can see it plainly when Bishop, arms folded over a trench coat, sits across from Cosmo in a room full of mainframe cabinets.

The movement inside that case is the interesting part. The 7A28 was the world's first analog quartz chronograph caliber, introduced by the same company that had released the first analog quartz watch, the original Astron, in 1969. Seiko engineered it against the disposable reputation quartz was acquiring: every part metal, 15 jewels, adjustable by a watchmaker the way a mechanical caliber is, with a chronograph seconds hand that sweeps instead of ticking. Production ran for about a decade, ending around 1992, the year Sneakers reached theaters.